I use Bloglines every day and have done so for a long time. The problems and inefficiencies of synchronization between multiple machines– particularly given that I often travel and work from areas with extremely poor bandwidth– have made desktop feed reading solutions unusable.
But it doesn’t seem like there has been much innovation in the area of online aggregators for a while. With all the interesting new AJAX interfaces in programs like Google Maps and Backpack and the continued upswell in the use of RSS, I had hoped to see constant growth. Instead I see only stagnation.
What am I missing? Where’s the competition for Bloglines? Where’s the innovation, growth, and change? I want a smoother interface with drag and drop, feed tagging and discovery (ala del.icio.us for feeds), less clunky features for notes/archiving/blogging– it isn’t hard to think of 100 good ideas for improvement. But when will it happen?
Stop picking my brain! lol, seriously, I hear what you’re saying. I can’t help but think of how easy it is to create photo sets on Flickr using a drag and drop rich Web interface. With so many services for online RSS reading, you’d think at least one would stand out with this kind of technology. ~d
Have you tried out rojo? I see it in my logs every once in a while, and occasionally consider trying it out—but haven’t ever done so. It advertises a nice set of features, including discovery and tags.
I agree. RSS applications have just “ceased” production, for some reason.
For a tool I use every hour of every day (Bloglines), I would hope there would be improvements, enhancements, etc.
Instead, there’s nothing.
I like Bloglines a lot – but like every other web app, or web site – if something newer or better came along, I’d certainly give it a try.
I’m open for NEW things – not the same thing. And, frankly, I’m getting tired of Bloglines.
But not because it’s not a great service (it’s one of the best services I’ve ever used) – but because nothing “new” comes out of it.
The internet is about “change,” and discovery – but with RSS apps, it’s dead water.
I’m a bloglines user too – I tried feedster but thought it was a mess. I’m getting tired of bloglines as well, though I don’t know why – while I would like tags and such as well (livejournal recently began supporting tags for entries, for instance), I find the main problem is just getting bored with the sheer mass of feeds I can accumulate.
Even more of a disaster, however, is using Thunderbird to collect RSS feeds – psychologically, I’m less interested, and so minor tics are magnified. Sage for Firefox is something I’ve also used; it opens up feeds as a series of boxes in a page (instead of Thunderbirds entry-as-an-email view) which is a similar preview mode as bloglines. But nothing I’ve found as use-able as bloglines; you’d think with all the buying activity, more money would be going into aggregator development.
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